CHAP. I.] 



FATENAS. 



gradually or sinking into a growth of underwood, but 

 stopping abruptly and at once, the tallest trees forming 

 a fence around the avoided spot, as if they enclosed an 

 area of solid stone. These sunny expanses vary in 

 width from a few yards to many thousands of acres ; in 

 the lower ranges of the hills they are covered with tah 1 

 lemon-grass (Andropogon schcenanihus), of which the op- 

 pressive perfume and coarse texture, when full grown, 

 render it so distasteful to cattle, that they will only crop 

 the delicate braird which springs after the surface has 

 been annually burnt by the Kandyans. Two stunted 

 trees, alone, are seen to thrive in these extraordinary 

 prairies, Careya arborea^ and Emblica officinalis, and 

 these only below an altitude of 4000 feet. Above this, 

 the lemon-grass is superseded by hardier and more wiry 

 species ; the earth being still the same, a mixture of 

 disintegrated quartz largely impregnated with oxide of 

 iron, but wanting the phosphates and other salts which 

 are essential to highly organised vegetation. 1 The extent 

 of this patena land is enormous in Ceylon, amounting to 

 millions of acres ; and it is to be hoped that the com- 

 plaints which have hitherto been made by the experi- 

 mental cultivators of coffee in the Kandyan provinces 

 may hereafter prove exaggerated, and that much that 

 has been attributed to the poverty of the soil may even- 

 tually be traced to deficiency of skill on the part of the 

 early planters. 



The natives in the same lofty localities find no defi- 

 cient returns in the crops of rice, which they raise in 

 the ravines and hollows, into which the earth from 

 above has been washed by the periodical rains ; but 

 rice cultivation is so entirely dependent on the pre- 



1 HOTBOLDT is disposed to ascribe 

 the absence of trees in the vast grassy 

 plains of South America to "the 

 destructive custom of setting fire to 

 the -woods, when the natives want to 

 convert the soil into pasture : when 

 during the lapse of centuries grasses 

 and plants have covered the surface 



with a carpet, the seeds of trees can 

 no longer germinate and fix them- 

 selves in the earth, although birds 

 and winds carry them continually 

 from the distant forests into the 

 Savannahs." Narrative, vol. i. ch. 

 vi. p. 242. 



